1877 | Literature
Literature
The Boston Library opens on Copley Square in a Romanesque building designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. Its chief benefactor has been the late Joshua Bates, a local financier who was a partner in London's Baring Brothers from 1828 until his death in 1864 at age 76 (see 1895).
Nonfiction: Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzjung der Wissenschaft) (first of two volumes) by Friedrich Engels attacks Dühring's socialist ideas and "vulgar Materialism"; Inductive Metrology, or the Recovery of Ancient Measures from the Monuments by London-born British archaeologist (William Matthew) Flinders Petrie, 24, who has done field work at Stonehenge and other sites to develop a way of determining by mathematical calculations the unit of measurement used in constructing such ancient monuments; On the Art of War and Mode of Warfare . . . Among the Ancient Mexicans by Swiss-born anthropologist-archaeologist Adolph (Francis Alphonse) Bandelier, 37, whose study of Aztec culture has been influenced by Lewis Morgan.
Economist-editor Walter Bagehot dies at his native Lanport, Somerset, March 24 at age 51; historian-diplomat John Lothrop Motley at Dorchester, Dorset, England, May 29 at age 63 while working on a continuation of his History of the United Netherlands ("If Philip [Felipe II of Spain] possessed a single virtue it has eluded the conscientious research of the writer of these pages," he has written. "If there are vices—as possibly there are—from which he was exempt, it is because it is not permitted to human nature to obtain perfection even in evil").
Fiction: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; The American by Henry James; Deephaven (stories) by South Berwick, Maine, author Sarah Orne Jewett, 27.
Poetry: Lis Isclo d'Or by Frédéric Mistral; Proverbs in Porcelain by Austin Dobson.
Poet-novelist Caroline Norton dies at her native London June 15 at age 69, having helped to gain passage of the Marriage and Divorce Act of 1857 that abolished some of the inequities that burdened married women.
Juvenile: Black Beauty by English author Anna Sewell, 57, whose "Autobiography of a Horse" will be a worldwide bestseller and remain popular for more than a century. Crippled early in life, Sewell has been confined to her Norfolk home for the past 5 or 6 years, gets a flat £2O for her manuscript, and will receive no royalties, but her book will be credited by some with helping to abolish the cruel practice of using checkreins; That Lass o' Lowrie's by English-born U.S. author Frances (Eliza) Burnett (née Hodgson), 28.